Upmarket furniture retailer, Pottery Barn is launching an augmented reality app, called 3D Room View, that lets customers visually try out living room furniture before they buy it.

3D Room View will give customers the option to see any Pottery Barn product in any existing room, even if it’s empty. End-users will be able to add, move and remove furniture, rugs, lamps and pillows and change the colour of the pillows and upholstery.

Two web-based tools for desktop and mobile will also be available: one to help teens design their own rooms around a desk from Pottery Barn and another that shows couches in 360-degrees.

The 3D Room View app works with Google’s Project Tango, a platform that uses motion tracking, area learning, and depth perception to allow mobile devices to understand their position relative to the world around them.

Since the app operates on Tango, only two phones will be able to run 3D Room view as of right now — the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and the Asus ZenFone AR.

The app itself is available to everyone, but the pilot program that pairs interested customers with design specialists who can show the Tango-enabled tools in-store is only in the San Francisco area.

Ikea and Lowe’s Home Improvement already offer AR apps, while homewares ecommerce retailer Wayfair launched its own last November.

From Engadget